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Sun, 01 Mar 2015 13:39:13 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.5How to make philosophy epichttp://philosophyforlife.org/how-to-make-philosophy-epic/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-make-philosophy-epic
http://philosophyforlife.org/how-to-make-philosophy-epic/#commentsSun, 27 Feb 2011 05:28:00 +0000http://philosophyforlife.org/?p=256Richard Weber has a dream. He grew up in a rough neighbourhood in Connecticut, where most people he knew spent their free time doing weed, coke, heroin or crystal meth. By the time he was 18, Richard was doing coke every night. He managed to pull out of that free fall before it killed him, Read more...

]]>Richard Weber has a dream. He grew up in a rough neighbourhood in Connecticut, where most people he knew spent their free time doing weed, coke, heroin or crystal meth. By the time he was 18, Richard was doing coke every night. He managed to pull out of that free fall before it killed him, as it killed several of his friends. He started doing civic activism, working out and practicing martial arts, perfecting his hip hop MC-ing skills, and reading ancient philosophy.

He picked up a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations from his local public library, and was deeply impressed. He says: “I completely understood what he was talking about. It reminded me of Buddhism, but it didn’t say that all life is suffering. It said life is good and full of happiness if you learn to follow the path of virtue.”

He’s now on an epic quest: to set up a training school for young people that will teach them Stoic philosophy and martial arts, for free. He’s financing it through the sales of his hip hop music. He says: “I want to create the Stoic version of the Shaolin monks.”

Here’s why Richard’s work is important: popular philosophy is clearly enjoying a revival, and is broadening its reach into the realm of self-help. But its audience is still somewhat confined to the self-help audience, which is to say, mainly middle class people between the ages of 30 and 50. That’s an important audience, but the question is how to widen the appeal to others, particularly younger people. How do we get young people into philosophy or Positive Psychology when, as the psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky admits, “so much of it seems hokey or Pollyanna-ish”?

If we’re going to broaden the appeal of the ideas of philosophy, we need to make it epic. We need to fit them within an epic, heroic framework. That’s what the human psyche responds to, particularly when we’re adolescents. Think about the stories that have meant something to us over the last few decades, like The Matrix, the Star Wars films, the Lord of the Rings films, the Spiderman films, even the Toy Story trilogy. These films contain ideas from moral philosophy and spirituality, but they put them within the framework of epic, heroic quests. That’s how they got their ideas to spread so widely.

You might think I’m joking. What does Spiderman have to do with moral philosophy? But I’m serious: the only moral philosophy many young people come across today is the scraps of it contained in popular culture, scraps like ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ (Spiderman) or ‘hate leads to anger, anger leads to suffering’ (Star Wars) or ‘Free your mind’ (The Matrix) or ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us’ (Lord of the Rings). These hackneyed moral proverbs got the circulation they did because they were embedded in the heroic narratives that our minds crave.

Let me use a metaphor – if the ideas of philosophy are like a space shuttle, then the epic narrative is like the rocket-booster, that propels it into orbit. If it wasn’t for the booster, the ideas would probably never get off the ground.

Take the Bhagavad Gita, a work of philosophy sneaked into mass circulation by being embedded in the middle of the epic narrative of the Mahabharata. In the middle of a battle, at the moment of highest suspense, Krishna stops his chariot, turns round, and delivers a 700-verse philosophical treatise to Arjuna. Take Star Wars. In the middle of the epic battle between the Empire and the Rebellion, Luke heads off to Dagobah and listens to a long philosophical disquisition by Yoda. Think of the Arthurian myths. For several books, Arthur and his knights pursue their worldly adventures, and then suddenly Galahad goes off on a spiritual quest for the Holy Grail. The monks and clerics of the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries knew their business. They knew that if they wanted to make the ideas of Christianity spread widely in the brutal culture of the Dark Ages, they would need to present them as warrior hero stories. So they invented chivalric romances.

Philosophy has historically been suspicious of epic narratives. Plato, who initially wanted to be a tragic playwright, banished poets from his Republic because he was scared of poetry’s magical power over the irrational, emotional parts of our nature. That was a big mistake. One of the reasons Greco-Roman philosophy was swept away by Christianity, despite the best efforts of Julian the Apostate, was because Christianity took Greek philosophical ideas and embedded them in the framework of an epic narrative of bravery, sacrifice, love and the cosmic battle between Good and Evil.

Christianity created heroic role models, martyrs whose life-histories embedded Christian ideas into inspiring stories. Philosophy has few such heroic role models, unfortunately. And it needs them. Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian philosopher and author of Heroes and Hero Worship, understood this better than most philosophers. He wrote: “not our logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward”.

Today, if we want to invent something to fill the ‘God-shaped hole’ left by the decline of Christianity, then we need to present the ideas of philosophy and psychology using the language of epic warrior quests, whether in non-fiction books or, even better, in novels and movies. The most successful modern works of ideas have presented them within the framework of heroic quests: think of Sophie’s World or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Psychologists and philosophers are beginning to realize this. One example is a new initiative by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who is famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment in the 1960s. He’s just launched something called the Heroic Imagination Project, which teaches the principles of social psychology to young people using the narratives and rhetoric of heroes and superheroes.

Another example is the ground-breaking games design of Jane McGonigal, who argues that computer games are so popular with young people because they tap into our natural desire for heroic, epic quests. So, if you want to spread positive memes, put them in a game-like framework where young people can feel they are on an epic quest where they can earn achievements and level up their skills. She helped herself overcome the effects of concussion by turning it into a heroic game, in which she was ‘Jane the Concussion Slayer’, battling the demons of her concussion symptoms [see the post before this one, which has a video of her talking about this]. She and other game-designers are now building games to teach the ideas of philosophy and Positive Psychology to young people, using heroic quest narrative games.

What we really need are stories. We need, as Carlyle wrote, a “Poet and inspired Maker, who, Prometheus-like, can shape new Symbols, and bring new Fire from Heaven to fix it there”. Who’s up for that epic quest?

]]>http://philosophyforlife.org/how-to-make-philosophy-epic/feed/4Jane McGonigal…Awesome!http://philosophyforlife.org/jane-mcgonigal-awesome/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jane-mcgonigal-awesome
http://philosophyforlife.org/jane-mcgonigal-awesome/#commentsSat, 26 Feb 2011 06:25:00 +0000http://philosophyforlife.org/?p=258Man, games designer Jane McGonigal is so awesome. Check this vid out, about a game she invented to help herself overcome concussion. She is amazing.

]]>http://philosophyforlife.org/jane-mcgonigal-awesome/feed/0Newsletter 19/2/2011: why cults are like computer games and other curious factshttp://philosophyforlife.org/newsletter-1922011-why-cults-are-like-computer-games-and-other-curious-facts/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=newsletter-1922011-why-cults-are-like-computer-games-and-other-curious-facts
http://philosophyforlife.org/newsletter-1922011-why-cults-are-like-computer-games-and-other-curious-facts/#commentsSat, 19 Feb 2011 04:55:00 +0000http://philosophyforlife.org/?p=269So I bought a Kindle yesterday. Yes, boys with toys, another new gadget, I couldn’t resist. I love it. All those new books at a touch of a button. The first book I bought, which you can only get as an e-book, was what the FT called ‘the most talked-about non-fiction book of the year’ Read more...

]]>So I bought a Kindle yesterday. Yes, boys with toys, another new gadget, I couldn’t resist. I love it. All those new books at a touch of a button. The first book I bought, which you can only get as an e-book, was what the FT called ‘the most talked-about non-fiction book of the year’ – economist Tyler Cowen’s long essay, The Great Stagnation. It suggests economic growth is much lower now because we have picked all the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of technological innovation and the pace of new scientific ideas has slowed over the last 30 years. However, he suggests that while economic growth may be slowing, the outlook is more positive for personal growth and well-being. “The new low-hanging fruit is in our minds”, he says, sounding a bit like Tyler Durden.

It’s interesting that the most-talked about non-fiction book of the year should be a short e-book, or an e-ssay, if you will. Could Kindle and iPad save the essay and lead us back to a golden age of New Journalism-type long articles? I hope so. Cause for optimism: Kindle’s new Kindle Singles format, which publishes essays, long articles and short stories, and which includes a new series launched by TED. Props to Nic Marks of the New Economics Foundation for being one of the first on the new format with his Happiness Manifesto. Nic’s colleague at the Centre for Well-Being at nef, Charles Seaford, is talking about the politics of well-being at the London Philosophy Club in two weeks, in London. Sign up to the Club – we have Maurice Glasman, Ed Miliband’s new fave philosopher, talking about the Good Society in March.

The second e-book I bought in my first flush of Kindle-mania was Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, which I’ve mentioned on the blog before. McGonigal, an idealistic games designer, thinks the reason people spend so much time playing games is that reality as it is presently constructed is broken. It’s not satisfying our basic human needs for engagement, participation, self-determination and mastery – while games and virtual worlds are (plus games let us blow shit up). So we have two choices – retreat further into the virtual world of gaming, or try to use gaming thinking to make reality better. Ask why we like playing games so much, and then use that to make our lives better. Here’s one effort at what McGonigal calls ‘happiness hacking’ – a programme called Superme, which uses games and videos to try and teach the principles of Positive Psychology to teens.

One of the reasons we like games is because they give us a clear sense of progress and mastery – we can see that we’ve advanced to be a Level 5 Wizard (or whatever). In life, it’s not quite so clear if we have ascended to the next level. Maybe that’s why people slave away at corporate careers – at least they can see their visible and quantifiable progress up the ranks. It’s also perhaps why people get drawn into cults like Scientology: because they’re like computer games. They promise that, if you put enough coins into the machine, eventually you will become an Operating Thetan level VII. Read the New Yorker’s brilliant long article on Oscar-winning screenwriter Paul Haggis’ defection from Scientology, or my summary of it here. He estimates he spent around $300,000 to become an level VII thetan. That’s an expensive game.

Maybe if we could measure our well-being and see more obvious progress, like in a computer game, we’d spend more effort and be more motivated to ‘hack happiness’. That’s the thinking behind this new start-up, Gravity Eight, which aims to spread the philosophy of the ‘quantified self’, and provide users with a dashboard of measurements for their physical, emotional, social and spiritual well-being, so we can ‘power up’ to level 3 Spirituality (no really, look on the right).

I’m ambivalent about the whole craze for measuring well-being. I like the shift beyond GDP, but there are limits to what one can quantify. Can you imagine a ‘meaning machine’ that tells us how much meaning our life has, like a weight machine telling us our weight? No? That’s because meaning is a more subjective and intangible quality, which you can’t sum up in a number (thank God).

Here’s a review I wrote of Daniel Batson’s important new book, Altruism in Humans, which considers his 30 years work testing out the ‘empathy-altruism hypothesis’ via lab experiments on humans. I think it’s the first review of the book. Batson’s conclusion: humans are altruistic, but the motivation doesn’t always lead to the common good. We need other pro-social motives, like collectivism and principalism.

The dark side of human nature was on show this week, with the upsetting news about the mob attack on CBS reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square amid the euphoria of Mubarak’s ousting (she apparently wasn’t raped, contrary to early reports). As Edmund Burke warned us, revolutions can bring out the devils in us as well as the angels. Some wondered if women should be sent into conflict zones. That question was raised back in 1991, when the army surgeon Rhonda Cornum was captured and sexually molested in the First Iraq War. She bounced back, and is now a Brigadier-General in charge of the US Army’s resilience-training programme, which launched its new ‘resiliency campus’ last month. Re McGonigal, the Army also launched a ‘virtual resilience island’ on the online game Second Life.

The war correspondent Kim Barker, who herself has experience of being sexually molested in conflict zones, summed up my feelings on the incident well, in a column in the New York Times. She wrote: “In the coming weeks, I fear… that there will be suggestions that female correspondents should not be sent into dangerous situations. It’s possible that bosses will make unconscious decisions to send men instead, just in case. Sure, men can be victims, too — on Wednesday a mob beat up an ABC reporter too, and a few male journalists have told of being sodomized by captors — but the publicity around Ms. Logan’s attack could make editors think, “Why take the risk?” That would be the wrong lesson. Women can cover the fighting just as well as men, depending on their courage.” And Logan apparently has plenty of that.

On a lighter note, here’s a story of a woman’s bravery in conquering her claustrophobia, to such an extent that she has become a circus ‘genie in a bottle’. She faced her demons by getting her mother to put her in a bin. Ah, bin therapy, your time has finally come.

Whew, lots of reading this week! I kind of have information indigestion. Infodigestion (n): ‘A feeling of weariness, confusion and nausea after one has consumed too much information and exhausted one’s cognitive bandwidth’. Epictetus once said: ‘if talk among laymen should arise on some philosophical principle, remain, for the most part, silent, for there is a considerable danger that you will immediately vomit up that which you have not digested’. Probably not a blogger, then.

]]>http://philosophyforlife.org/newsletter-1922011-why-cults-are-like-computer-games-and-other-curious-facts/feed/1Paul Ekman…the video game!http://philosophyforlife.org/paul-ekman-the-video-game/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=paul-ekman-the-video-game
http://philosophyforlife.org/paul-ekman-the-video-game/#commentsFri, 17 Dec 2010 00:56:00 +0000http://philosophyforlife.org/?p=310Rockstar, the game company behind Grand Theft Auto, is releasing a new game in 2011 called LA Noire, which uses cutting-edge new technology to create what they say is the most lifelike computer animation of the human face yet. This is crucial for the game, in which you play a detective trying to work out Read more...

]]>Rockstar, the game company behind Grand Theft Auto, is releasing a new game in 2011 called LA Noire, which uses cutting-edge new technology to create what they say is the most lifelike computer animation of the human face yet. This is crucial for the game, in which you play a detective trying to work out if people are lying. Time to dust off your Paul Ekman and study those micro-expressions!